Apparently we’re giving free services to assholes.

Yeah, that’s a little harsh, but we’ve got our boxers in a twist at the moment. (And sorry for the late post today… we were debating whether to put this one up at all.)

For many years now, EssaySnark has been offering pro bono MBA admissions consulting work for members of the military and alumni from Teach for America and the Peace Corps. We do this because we really appreciate someone who has a mentality of service and has dedicated their early careers to giving back to the system, and also because we know that people in these service fields aren’t exactly being paid the beaucoup bucks.

Not that our services are all that expensive in the first place. But, you know, you get a lot out of life, as we have, you’re obligated to give some back. At least, that’s basically where we’re coming from with it.

We are not doing it for accolades and recognition. We’re doing it because it’s our aesthetic. (If you want to learn more about this type of orientation to life, you can check out a very good book on the subject of giving and success, called Give and Take by Wharton prof Adam Grant.)

Now, just recently, we’ve started to wonder about the kind of people who we’re lavishing these free goodies upon. This probably won’t make us stop offering these freebies, but it sure has given us pause.

Of the free Comprehensive Profile Reviews that we’ve done this year, none of the recipients has even acknowledged receipt. Oh wait, take that back; one of them did… after we asked about it. Here’s how that exchange went:

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Military Snark wrote:

Hello XXXX —

Your free Comprehensive Profile Review was delivered on 1/9/14. We never heard back from you. Was it received?

Military Snark

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 12:55 PM, XXX wrote to Military Snark:

Yes, I received the profile review. Thank you for the analysis.

Well. They told us, now didn’t they? Didn’t even sign the damn email.

[Update: Since first drafting this a week or so ago, another one of these guys sent an email with some thanks – but again, not till after we followed up.]

It’s not like we’re looking for all these oohs and ahhs of appreciation. But check it out: Those reports we produce, they average like 13 pages. This is not no trivial thumbs-up/thumbs-down read on your profile. We dig in and look at the details. Each one takes about two hours of our time. We don’t cut any corners because it’s free; we give you the exact-same service that we give to others who plunk down 150 bucks for it (the whole thing should cost even more than that, but whatever).

Why should we continue doing these for free for a group of ungrateful punks?

Because yeah, that’s kinda how we feel about some of you right about now.

Like, c’mon. How hard is it to send a simple email to say ‘Thanks’?

Didn’t your mama teach you no manners?

Sheesh people. As you can see, we’re rather disillusioned at the moment.

Some of our strongest relationships to date are with military candidates who have gone through this process and ended up at great schools. We’re big fans of some vets currently at places like Columbia, Duke and Cornell. We’re still in touch with some who’ve already graduated and gone out into the world – we know some vets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Amazon, and Goldman Sachs, among other top firms. You guys can be quite successful in life. We’ve also spent the last season rooting from the sidelines for a bunch of military applicants who are now headed to MIT, Wharton, and Booth. We love you guys. We’re going to continue to give back to the system and especially to try and help those who serve make a smooth transition back into civilian life. The MBA can be a great path for a soldier.

The very best way to say “thanks” to anything the ‘Snark may have provided as input into your process is to go on and achieve success: Get into a great school, go on to an awesome new career. We totally dig it when we hear back from people who have done that – and we know that it’s due to their efforts, not ours, that they made it happen. It’s not like you wouldn’t have gotten to where you are except for that 15-page report that we provided to you at the beginning. We’re not interested in taking credit for all your success.

We’re just a little surprised at how this has gone lately. You guys are making us feel old; we’ve got those “Damn kids these days!” thoughts running around the head.

Military candidates, we’d love for you to step up and show us the type of people you are – that we know you to be. Maybe a couple guys got sloppy or forgetful or whatever. We know you’re not all like that. (If you’re thinking about engaging EssaySnark and taking us up on our offer of freebies for the military, then here’s what you can do: To prove that you read this post and you care about the reputation of your military cohort, then when you send in your credentials with the request for access to the Military MBA site, we encourage you to say so – in fact, anyone who includes the statement “I care about good manners” in their request will be approved for a free review – if that clause is missing we’ll know you didn’t read this, or you don’t care about manners (!), and that says a lot too!)

We originally planned to give this puppy away to qualified servicemembers and vets.

What we’re doing instead is we’ve slapped a nominal price on it – $ 9.95. We will offer it as a freebie with the purchase of any MBA admissions consulting services for military BSers.

And we’ll keep an open mind on how this little pro bono initiative of ours may proceed from here. If the doormat treatment ceases, then we’ll make this new Military MBA guide available for free as originally intended. Let’s see how things go.

Thanks for listening.

/rantover.

UPDATE 8/3/14

Since this posting in April, we’ve done 20 more of these freebie profile reviews, and we’ve been amazed and impressed with the backgrounds and qualifications – and humility – of the majority of these military BSers.

HOWEVER: Of those 20, there are still five people who never wrote back or acknowledged the service in any way.

Five people. Out of 20.

A 25% schmuck rate is not a good number.

We’ve also now blasted past the total value of pro bono services provided in all of 2013 – and it’s only August. We’ve contributed over $6500 in free services to military and other do-gooder types so far in 2014. That’s kind of a lot. Each of those profile reviews takes several hours and even the retail price of $149 nowhere compensates us for the time – nor does it accurately reflect the value to a BSer. And we offer them FOR FREE.

Why should we continue to do these?

That’s a serious question. Your ideas and input in the comments to this post are welcome.

UPDATE 11/3/14

Well, we had in fact been continuing with these over the past few months, and we met a bunch more truly impressive servicemembers along the way. But between the weird one-line “requests” for free stuff that we got from some people, and several more instances of delivering a couple hours worth of work into a complete void of nothingness… we started to have second (third? tenth?) thoughts on all this.

Here’s a winner of a response we just received from one person – oh wait. In full disclosure, we need to share with you what we wrote first. Here was our follow-up, sent 10 days after delivering his free profile report:

We made sure to deliver your profile review before your GMAT test, as you had requested, even though we didn’t get the questionnaire submitted until the last minute. You logged on to retrieve the report. Then nothing.

Oh well.

No, it was not a sugar-coated email. ‘Cuz this lack of manners is, like, you know, ANNOYING.

We’ll save you the full extent of the rant we got back and just post this final paragraph that he sent (within 20 minutes of us sending ours):

You (and the company you represent) really SHOULD discontinue your pro-bono for military if your primary purpose for offering it is solely to get our business or to earn our gratitude. If you want to continue offering it as a service to THANK servicemen and women for serving YOU and protecting YOUR FREEDOMS, than that is awesome.

Yeah, we are in fact thinking of discontinuing it… Thanks.

UPDATE 11/4/14

After reflecting on the whole situation overnight we are indeed pulling the plug on our pro bono program for 2014. We donated over $10k in free services to you military types in 10 months this year and that’s a pretty good run! We will continue offering blahg access and many serious discounts on our admissions consulting services for military candidates. You can read what’s currently available on our Military MBA page.

So who the heck is EssaySnark, anyway?!

We're the snarky experts in MBA admissions!

Sometimes amused and often appalled by what candidates write in their MBA applications to top bschools, EssaySnark created this little blahg to share common mistakes. Learn from them and avoid making admissions directors laugh (or want to hurl) when they read your essays. If you are hoping to have your essay reviewed anonymously on the blahg for free, submit it for consideration.

Want EssaySnark's personal assistance with your MBA applications? Start with our menu of consulting services and please read the Help FAQ to learn how we operate. Still have questions after doing all that? Email Team EssaySnark at gethelpnow at essaysnark dot com.

Good luck on your apps, Brave Supplicant!

Here's what others have said about this:

As recipient of an EssaySnark Comprehensive Profile Review and a military member, I definitely took time to express my gratitude for that awesome service and have made an effort to keep in touch throughout my application process. Perhaps I wasn’t included in the stats because I commented on the profile review on this website, rather than sending an email? Maybe you should check other sources before calling all of us out. Just saying…

Did you even read the post? The whole middle of it is talking about how we HAVE kept in touch with a bunch of people or more precisely, how a bunch of people HAVE kept in touch with us. This is directed to those who received pro bono services specifically THIS YEAR. Not that everyone who got them last year was as respectful as you were. We do appreciate the comments on the blahg too and if someone did that then it counts as saying “thanks.” We’re talking about people who responded with complete silence after we sent them the report.

Yes, I did read the post. You said that “Of the free Comprehensive Profile Reviews that we’ve done this year, none of the recipients has even acknowledged receipt.” Are you talking calendar year or application year? My mistake if you meant the former, since I assumed you were talking this current application year 2013-2014. Just seemed like you unintentionally cast out a pretty large net and more people feel caught in it than you intended, that’s all =)

On behalf of the military community, I apologize. Unfortunately, there are a few of us that may have developed an undeserved sense of entitlement over the years. Military freebies are actually quite common, especially with the GWOT, and every now and then, we need a wake up call to let us know that we’re not necessarily owed these things.

So, thank you for your pro bono services! The rift to transition from civilian to military is quite a chasm; we appreciate those companies that help make that leap a little easier.

You were, again, one of the applicants that we were thrilled to work with this past season, and we’re not surprised to see you posting this comment. This and other remarks that we’ve gotten behind the scenes recently have been helpful to better understand the mindset going on with some of these military people. (Had to google “GWOT” – that shows how much of an outsider EssaySnark actually is with this community.)

So, thank you, to you and others who’ve been piping up. As we stated in the post, we’re not going to stop offering these services… though we are wondering if we’re going to hear from the people who received them in the past few months. The silence is still deafening.

ES-
Just want to echo what my brothers and sisters are saying above. Thanks for what you do for the military community. I certainly learned a lot from my pro-bono comprehensive review last year and all the material you offer on the blahg. Your insight has shaped my strategy for my upcoming applications. Appreciate it!

And to those who take ES’s services for granted…come on bro! Don’t be that guy.

But if you’re really eager to mitigate against the problem, I would suggest you consider doing with the CPR what you’ve already done with the Military Guide: charge a *nominal* fee instead of giving the thing away for free. I wouldn’t be shocked at all if a $10 CPR fee was successful in warding off the ungrateful a-hole moocher types. (At any rate, it might be a fun social science experiment.)

Concur – I think adding a fee (I’d go $50 rather than $10) would add a barrier of entry for free-loading d-bags. I’m not going to apologize for the actions of others though. I’ve worked with my share of knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing idiots in the armed forces, but the difference is, those people usually don’t have the motivation to get out and apply to B-school.

Sounds like you’re dealing with the self-entitled douche-nozzle population that expects to get to the front of the line at a strip club in Vegas because they’re military. In other words, these aren’t the people who humbly go about their business in serving their country – they’re in the military and want to broadcast it to the world because they think wearing their service dress uniforms in public is enough to get them laid.

But I feel your pain ‘Snark – as the VP of admissions for vets at my school, I’ve helped out quite a few people both in person and over the phone…and sometimes I just don’t hear a simple “thank you” from people. Total radio silence. I’m talking about people who get admitted and who don’t bother to say “hey, I got in!” That bothers me the most because:

1) I’m going to see their faces next year anyway if they decide to attend

2) I work closely with admissions and they keep me abreast of the incoming vet class, so I know who’s coming anyway

So yeah – a courtesy “thanks for taking the time to have lunch with me during my visit” would have been cool.

Wait – you went into the military in order to cut in front of the line at the strip clubs? Aha, now we understand the strategy!

Maybe we should compare notes… trade names or something… we can put you on alert for any of the ungrateful types that come through here first, and vice versa. Maybe we can get a little Veterans Club watch list together or something.

We’ve often fantasized about letting adcoms know about true BSer behavior – even though this wam-bam-forgot-to-thank-you-ma’am stuff doesn’t really qualify for that (not like this one…). This is just in the category of irritating. But damn, if the schools really wanted to know about candidates, they’d ask their admissions consultants!!! That whole how do you treat people when no one is watching thing.

We also appreciate how much the good guys are working to compensate for the lame-Os. There’s been a bunch of you ever since this first post who’ve been very forthcoming with comments of thanks – so that is making up for the 25%. The whole point of doing this is to help the good guys get in, and so we’re honored to continue plugging away on that mission. We’ll figure out a tweak to the process so that we can feel better about how it’s going down.

@OldSalt, thanks for posting those links – not sure they’re entirely applicable but we get the point. We’d actually be surprised if the society-at-large schmuck rate is only 25%! But the thing is: We expected more from this class of individual. We’ve been accused of being too idealistic plenty of times before, but we honestly believe that serving in the military is a noble vocation, and even if someone didn’t start out their service career being “noble” then at least the experience of going through it will teach some degree of respect – and, we thought, manners. That last part is apparently where we got it wrong. Not expecting anyone to bow down to us but sheesh.

True confessions time: One reason why we are so bothered by the deep-space silence that happens sometimes? It’s because these guys are often deployed… and we can’t help but wonder, shit, what happened?? Probably nothing but… man that’s not a nice thing to think about. Of course, if you’re deployed, we know that you’re not always able to get back online with much consistency. We don’t look for an immediate response. Heck, anytime within like two or three weeks would be grand. To like tell us you’re still alive.

So if you’re reading this and you got your report and you never wrote to us afterwards, it’s not too late!

As to the idea for a $10 or even higher fee: That just goes against what this is supposed to be about. Again, call us idealists; we’re not trying to weed out the freeloaders (OK maybe we are) – we’re more trying to emphasize that MANNERS MATTER. How hard is it?

But we’re going to think about that suggestion. The other idea that was floated was ditch the free review completely but continue to offer the massively discounted Complete Essay Package – military can get it for like 60% of the going rate – not sure if that’s the way to go either.

Really appreciate the thoughts about this, thanks for posting, you’ve given us more to think about.

Without a doubt, this is the best feedback you will receive for your profile. Detailed and in-depth, it will help you to make a more informed decision from the outset. I wish I had come across this website months ago. Many thanks to the entire MilSnark team.

Anyone who feels the need to make an overt reference to “protecting your freedoms” in an email is a dillweed. Joining the military didn’t result in losing your manners, and if anything it should have improved them. I’m just a simple staff officer POG and not a door-kicking Seal like that sweet bro but I still know how to say thank you.
So if I get a free entree at Hooters tonight, should I refuse to give the waitress a tip? Should I scream that WITHOUT ME ISIS WOULD BE RUNNING THIS MALL AND YOUD ALL BE WEARING ORANGE BURKHAS!
Thanks again for all the help essaysnark, and I’m sorry that more people won’t be able to take advantage of what was a great service.

Yeah that Hooters example is kinda where we’re coming from – if someone gives you $150 cash do you not say ‘thanks’ as soon as you get it? ‘Cuz that’s basically what we’ve been doing (value of the report), but apparently handing over a document via email doesn’t feel the same to everyone. Thanks for helping us not feel like complete assholes ourselves; we’d been feeling like real jerks, second- and third-guessing this for a week now. We imagine that we’ll get the itch to give back again once this latest episode is forgotten but we’re going to let it sit for the time being.

And we DO appreciate the service; there’s something about the mentality of a soldier and honor and all that that appeals to us, and many of the men and women we’ve worked with have been flat-out awesome – and we can’t wait to hear of all their next successes with this bschool gig.

So I was looking back through the archives when I came across this thread. (As an aside to military folks, holy s***, there is a ton of useful information posted on the blahg every single day that is given out as a freebie by EssaySnark. If you do nothing else, take advantage of it.)

And it made me feel mad, because EssaySnark’s heart is in the right place, and it’s a pretty important service they’re offering. B School shouldn’t just be for the bankers who can hire an admissions consultant for $4,000 per school.

And then it made me feel bad, because even though I’m in the middle of the process right now, I hadn’t stopped to take the time to thank you guys yet, either. Once I (we) get through this whole crazy ordeal of applications, I’ll happily write a big something to shout your virtues from the mountaintops. But for now, let me just say that the work is appreciated, and I’ll continue to spread the Gospel of Snark to any military folks I come across who are looking at B School.

@rchinga: A very belated “thank you!” to this comment! We saw it when you posted it last month, but got caught up in the craziness of deadlines and forgot to acknowledge it. (yeah, the irony, eh?) Anyway, appreciate the support – really we do!! And the best way that all of you BSers can make us feel appreciated in this is to get into some mothereffing bschools this year!! 😉

As a recipient of the pro-bono service and an active duty military member, I sincerely appreciate the work you do and your continued support to our community. But I do have to say, not all military members are created equal, just like you can’t generalize a certain race, the military is the same. The Army alone has approximately 500K active duty, and then there are National Guardsmen and Reservists. I think the number is about 800K for the Army, but i could be wrong. But then theres the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corp, and Coast Guard. So don’t lump all of us in the same boat. 🙂

We’re not generalizing. We’re relating our experiences. We don’t offer free services to 800k or whatever people; we offer them to a select few who come asking for help – which we’re happy to provide. But military or civilian, when you do something significant for someone, a simple acknowledgement of the effort is common courtesy, no?

We appreciate the comment but it sounds like you’re making excuses for something that in our view is just not excusable.

This is just about simple manners. It really doesn’t have anything to do with whether you serve or not.

And yet: Aren’t the military to be held to a higher standard of ethics and honor and character? Of course there’s going to be assholes in the 800k or whatever the U.S. military population is. That’s totally not the point.

The sad fact is that this behavior has continued again this season, even after we put more screening processes in place, and even when this post is prominently displayed. It just honestly really sucks.

So, again, thanks for the comment, but it didn’t really make us feel any better about this, ya know?

My name is Matt, I am a 33 year old medically discharged Australian army paratrooper (5 years) and I am now self-employed running my own health tech start-up (7 years).

I was looking to find our more and have a chat with someone about applying for American MBAs (round 2) and everything you offer and can help with. Its all quite foreign to an Australian.

I have only recently decided that I would pursue the possibility of moving to America for 2 years and completing my MBA there, I only wish I had arrived at this decision earlier. And have been spending 12+ hours a day since compiling what I need to and studying for a GRE.

Hopefully you have time and don’t mind, I included my email in the additional comment section.

Hey Matt! We’re glad you found us! We do have plenty of options available to support candidates for Round 2 and it sounds like you have a lot to offer in your apps! We’re nervous about timing of course, if you have not yet taken the GRE, given how quickly deadlines are coming. We can certainly set you up with free access to the blahg under our pro bono program and point you in the right direction for other services that might be suitable, given where you’re at in the process. You can check out the Military MBA microsite for instructions on how to submit your request and what we need for that. Good luck with everything!!

I took a GRE in Nov and have my next one booked for the 2 Jan 2018 and have been studying with a tutor as Im taking that part pretty serious.

I looked through the military MBA section and must have missed it, any chance one of the guys could reach out view email and contact that way, I’m hesitant of the time remaining . If not I totally understand you’re most likely busy 🙂

Yup, with Round 2 nipping at everyone’s heels, we are indeed busy! 🙂 Instructions for submitting a request are on that page, or you can check out our menu of services to see all that’s available for whatever support you need!!